10 Minute Monday, Wistful November Edition

I’m itching to be creative, but feeling completely sapped of motivation… so I’ve decided to inflict “10 Minute Monday” upon myself. It sounds like a weekly feature, but I’ll probably never do it again… you know me when it comes to keeping up with a regular blog feature. Anyway, I’ve got the timer set for ten minutes and I’m just going to ramble.

NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo are going on right now, and I’m really yearning to create something massive and meaningful. Something like 30 days straight of blogging or 50,000 words of a novel. I always wondered why November was the chosen month for these two behemoth organized creative endeavors, and I think I’m finally beginning to understand it. Something about that feeling of impending hibernation makes my mind a little frantic to get artistic and creative things done before Winter officially settles in and all I can think about is driving through the snow to get to my kids’ doctor’s appointments. Because, trust me, come December, we’ll all be full of snot and nasty coughs.

I finally went back and started reading my 50,000 word piece that I wrote back in 2012. I’ve only gotten about 4 pages in, and it’s spurred a lot of mixed feelings. Some of it is ugh stop it, Lauren, and some of it is actually good. I mean, like really actually good. But when I say “some of it,” I mean, “a paragraph here or there.” Is this the writing process? Is this for real what successful writers do? Sit down for HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS and slave over a keyboard, just to pick out 12 decent pages from 104?

I just read a manuscript written by one of my friends, and cripes it was fun. It had me thinking about high school and the early days of the internet and 90’s music and how perfect Vanessa Carlton’s CD was when that one guy broke up with me, completely out of the blue, right in time for Christmas vacation.

It had all of these memories bubbling up… from high school to college. These memories could all be stories, in one way or another… but I don’t think I’m as brave as my friend, who can lay it all out there, first person, and totally crush it. I do think, though, that I could pull it off in the third person… in a much more fictional way.